


The Village that Vanished

by PastaBucket



Category: Cthulhu Mythos - H. P. Lovecraft
Genre: Gen, Horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-16
Updated: 2018-06-16
Packaged: 2019-05-24 00:54:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 642
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14944583
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PastaBucket/pseuds/PastaBucket
Summary: This fanfic is stupid, and I'm so sorry for writing it.





	The Village that Vanished

**Author's Note:**

> This fanfic is stupid, and I'm so sorry for writing it.

Forgive any clumpsy writing mistakes, for I haven't slept. It's not the things that haunt my dreams, but the memories that haunt my waking moments, that grips me from any refuge of a peaceful slumber.  
I know that you have questions, but I have no useful answers to give you. I will neither divulge the name of the village, nor will I obviously name the patient I visited there, since I don't want him traced, or - God forbid - found.  
...but I will still try to put this madness to paper, in a desperate attempt to exorcise it from my tormented mind. If this doesn't work, then my mind wanders to the revolver in my desk drawer.

It started with a desperate letter like any other: People close to the would-be patient who had seen him fall ill, were turning to me, as any other doctor, to come diagnose and cure him - usually to ward off death for even a day.  
This patient was a village elder, and so when I arrived I was greeted by quite the concerned gathering, who surrounded me and led me to his chambers.  
...and was it not for this gathering of people flocking around me and barring the exit, I would probably have fled then and there, for the black scabs he was covered in looked like the spawning grounds of some form of vicious plague.  
The man was in some sort of a barely conscious fever delirium, his skin bathing in sweat, and my attempts at introduction was met with mumbling ramblings about beings from other worlds. I put on my gloves and told the people closest to him to secure him while I dutifully scraped off some samples to take with me. "We will journey to the stars together.", he mumbled. Those words I distinctly remember.

I passed on the sample to the laboratory assistants whose fascination would surely one day kill them. For a few days they came up with nothing but guesses, but by Friday one of them entered my office with a sombre look and had me come down there.  
I was surprised to find the chinaman there - an apothecary, he claimed, and yet an expert. They showed me a slab of spoiled raw meat covered in dark patches similar to the scabs - evidence that the disease drew sustenance from the flesh itself, which meant that it wasn't circulatory. I realized that what I was looking at was mould - some kind of a flesh eating fungus.  
...but the assistant was aware that a fungi this aggressive wouldn't just spontaneously sprout up in the midst of a village. There would be hundreds of cases of skin rash. ...and so that's why the chinaman was here: He alone claimed to have seen similar cases before, in his homeland.  
He told me that somewhere there had to have been a cultivation of this mould, in a damp, dark place filled with flesh, which was the primary source of the contagion. ...and then he produced a jar filled with some kind of a white powder, telling me to go back to the village, and simply pour out its contents all over that place, without speaking a word about it to anyone - not even the elder.  
...and so I did.

I revisited the village a week later. I expected to find the elder dead, and me laughing at the chinaman's antics. I didn't expect to find him gone, along with everyone else in the village.  
I went from door to door, finding them all gape wide ajar and the homes they guarded empty.  
That's when a chill ran down my spine, as I turned around to look toward the centre of the village, and I knew.  
I didn't need to peer into there - the moaning sounds of the dead betrayed them.

They were all in the well.


End file.
